CAROLINA BARROS

...Artist Dossier

Landscape in transit, the most recent art project of Carolina Barros explores the porosity of the main and fuzzy edges of the urban development in the contemporary Chilean cities, manly the edges that permeate the rural territory and the housing growth. The difficult coexistence between the landscape from the central part of Chile and the powerful economy, make evident the contradictions of this system that destroys all the endogenous species of flora and fauna that step on his way.

More than a nostalgic critic to the evolution and the progress in society, the artist reflects on the series of monochrome paintings, plus a video about the exercise of expansion in landscape post contemporary industry, that was affected due to the disappearance of the lasts green nuances because of the constant fight between man and nature.

Limes it’s a Latin term used in the Roman Empire, it was used to define the boundaries or territory limits and to content the barbarian invasions. In their territorial borders they built walls, high tower to monitor and control all the access to their civilization. In this ancestral gesture being made by man for over two thousand years- history of our civilization- to expand and mark territories, points the main part of this piece of art, willing to to define the concept of “landscape in motion”, triggered by a confused traffic of trucks, laborers, loud noise, dust and precarious mesh fences that are hiding the transmutation operations of this fragile scene that irrupts in the Limes of the urban conglomerate.

Whenever this sinister veil extends, as a curtain in an emergency room, and after a while of operation, transform the vast horizon into an urban scenario with ostentatious architecture. In the ancient Roman Limes, the barbarian and soldiers generate economy activities as traffic, construction, trades, and then it took place the sedentary in human, with colonization and territorial expansion. After Limes appeared, it was time for village’s towns and cities.

In this “landscape in motion” me refer today from the past through its extinction. Place were constant memories are shown by Carolina Barros in a pertinacious reference about plastic tights in construction, and wood veins that mark horizontally the tremendous extensions of trees (espinos) that fight for survive in her paintings. The striking video that also makes reference to these resources mixes the camera travelling with the movement of the veil that act like if it was the main plot. So these finite Limes announce inexorable advances of the man and barbarism in the ruined countryside.